Transformers Age of Extinction

How do you review a movie like Transformers? It’s a three hour fiasco of dumb characters, stupid story and explosions. I know it’s bad, you know it’s bad, everybody knows it’s bad. It’s just the way things are.

And yet there’s some odd entertainment value to be had there. If you shut your brain off completely you will have fun. It’ll be nothing but loud noises and explosions, but if you’re sick, tired, recovering from surgery or otherwise impaired you can switch on any of the Transformers and just tune out completely. I know that’s what I do.

Reviewing a Transformer movie is pointless. It’s like making fun of a severely disabled person who doesn’t know any better. Also I admit to getting bored of straight reviews. So instead I’ll give a synopsis of the film. It’s not as though anybody watches Transformers for the story. And does anything that happens in a Transformer movie really count as spoiler material?

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Five year have passed since the events of the last Transformer film, where evil robot Decepticons tried to invade Earth, destroyed most of Chicago and killed thousands of people. The Autobots fought back and won the ‘war’ I guess, sending the remaining Decepticons into hiding. Since then though people have soured on the Transformers and are pretty much afraid of them. All human/Autobot partnerships have been disbanded and any remaining Deceptions are hunted down and killed. There’s a hotline to call to report robot activity and big business is being made of selling the scraps and robot parts from the battle.

Frasier (or Kelsey Grammer if you’re boring) plays the head of a secret CIA mercenary team called Cemetery Wind, which is tasked with hunting down and killing the remaining Decepticons. Frasier, however, wants to kill all the robots, and has Cemetery Wind hunt down the Autobots as well. Why? Because he doesn’t want the aliens to start any more trouble on Earth. But that’s not entirely true, because not long into the movie his motivations change; he just wants the special metal the robots are made of. He’s made a deal with a science company, run by Stanley Tucci, to sell them the robot metal so Tucci can create his own version of Transformers that they can control to create a robot army so no more soldiers have to die in combat. The problem is that robot metal is incredibly rare and they’ve run out of minable sources, so they need robot corpses to melt down.

And this is where things get a little confusing and complicated. Frasier has also made a secret deal with Lockdown, an evil Transformer bounty hunter (with his own evil ship and robot mercenary crew). He isn’t affiliated with the Autobots or Decepticons, he’s just another transforming robot. Frasier and Cemetery Wind plan to help Lockdown hunt and catch Optimus Prime so he can take him prisoner, and in return he’ll give Frasier a Transformer ‘Seed’, which is basically a bomb that makes more space metal. Frasier and Tucci want the seed so they can blow it up in the desert and have a massive mineable source of robot metal to make their robot army.

Moving on: Marky Mark plays Cade Yaeger, a scrapper/wannabe inventor who makes very little money repairing junk people dump at his Texas home. It’s important to note that everybody seems to call him by his full name. It’s always ‘Cade Yaeger’ and never just ‘Cade’. Marky Mark lives with his teenaged daughter Tessa, who constantly whines and bitches about how they have no money.

Ok, I need to make a side note here. Tessa is the single worst thing in this entire movie. She spends the movie screaming, crying and yelling ‘Help me!’ at Marky Mark. She’s downright useless and annoying and if she had been cut from the movie nothing of value would have been lost. She drags the movie down. Can you imagine what it takes to bring a Transformer movie, which is already on the low scale of quality, down? I actually never really appreciated Megan Fox until this point. I’ve always been, at best, ambivalent to Fox, but now I can actually appreciate what she brought to the Transformer movies. She was actually capable of being a person, she never did any crying and when the action started she got involved. Tessa does nothing but sit around screaming for help. She’s so bad she’s made me re-evaluate Megan Fox in a positive light from an acting standpoint. Think about that.

Marky Mark also has a comic relief sidekick who doesn’t do anything of note and is so forgettable I don’t even know his name. Anyway Marky Mark buys a ruined truck thinking he can pull it apart and make a profit on the scrap, but he finds out it’s actually a damaged Optimus Prime. Marky Mark, being an inventor, is intrigued and repairs Optimus. He learns that the Autobots are getting killed by Cemetery Wind and that Optimus is disillusioned by humanity and just wants to get the remaining Autobots back home to space.

The cowardly comic relief guy, thinking he can get some cash, phones in about Optimus Prime. Cemetery Wind shows up promptly and threatens Cade, wanting to know about Optimus Prime. Cade tells them nothing, so they threaten to kill his daughter. And they’re actually going to shoot her – it’s not just a threat, Frasier outright tells them to kill her. Anyway Optimus Prime uses the opportunity to show up and blow the crap out of everything. Cade, comic relief guy and Tessa run for it, and are picked up by Tessa’s Irish boyfriend in a rally car.

Ok side note number two; I was really afraid that the movie was going to focus on Tessa and her Irish boyfriend. The trailers, even with the Marky Mark focus, seemed to also push the duo. Thankfully they’re not really in the limelight much. Or at all. In fact Irish boyfriend turns out to be a wimp and all the badass moments are taken up by Marky Mark. Tessa and Irish guy end up being like the mermaid and the priest from Pirate of the Caribbean 4 – they’re forgettable stand-ins for characters in the previous films, seemingly only there because corporate types panicked that if those roles were absent people wouldn’t like the movie. Thankfully here they don’t sour the movie up too much.

Anyway Lockdown turns up and shoots at Optimus, but their fight is sort of in the background while we watch Marky Mark and company drive away from the bad guys. Eventually, after some weak car stunts that feel like they want to be like Fast and the Furious but don’t know how, the car is totalled and they have to flee to Optimus, now in truck form, to escape.

Lockdown uses a fancy robot metal grenade and the comic relief guy gets killed horribly. Like really gruesome. He gets turned into a gross skeletal husk of robot metal, with his skull exposed and his ribcage torn open. He sort of deserved it though, but whatever. This is one of the moments in this movie where you can tell they were trying to go for a more serious route. Optimus and co escape so there’s no worries there.

Optimus and his human buddies find the remaining Autobots, which include some green guy with a cockney accent, a samurai, John Goodman in robot form (he’s still fat) and the least interesting Autobot, Bumblebee. This is a little niggle but I feel as though Bumblebee should have been dropped. He’s just a tired holdover from the Shia LeBeouf movies and has no purpose here other than a reminder. He’s also the absolute least interesting Autobot, and his ‘I can only speak through radio clips’ shtick sucks.

Optimus and co want to leave Earth, but they also want to know what the evil science dudes are doing, so they send Marky Mark and Irish dude to investigate. Marky Mark infiltrates the science company and finds their lab, where he discovers that they’ve been melting down the corpses of the Autobots for the metal. He also finds out that Tucci has Megatron’s severed head (from the last movie) and that he’s been downloading information from it to discover how robot metal works and how to make Transformers. That’s how they found out about space metal and how to make robots.

Tucci is frustrated though, because every time he tries to make Galvatron, a large robot based on Optimus Prime, it ends up looking like Megatron. Like exactly like Megatron. This is where I feel Tucci should have sat down and thought about things a little; you’re downloading robot blueprints from the head of an evil robot, and the robot you make always ends up looking like said evil robot. Could that mean the robot you’re making will turn out to be evil?

Anyway Cade gets captured and Tucci questions him about the robots, only for Optimus and co to come to the rescue and trash the lab. As they flee Tucci activates Galvatron to chase them. Galvatron catches and beats up Optimus Prime (and also talks and basically says ‘I’m Megatron, Bwahahahaha’), and then Lockdown turns up and captures Prime. Because she’s useless, Tessa manages to get captured as well. She had a massive window of opportunity to escape but the dumb bitch doesn’t take it, instead just cries and screams for help. Marky Mark and the other Autobots are annoyed and decide to go to the rescue.

Lockdown takes Optimus into his ship and tells him why he wanted to capture him – there are some other aliens called ‘Creators’ who made all the transformers and for some reason they want Optimus back. Lockdown is working for them, or something. This narrative thread is really loose and just feels as though it’s there for future sequels. Anyway Lockdown locks Optimus down (yeah, I just wrote that) in a prison area on his ship and gives Frasier’s troops the Seed. Now that he’s got Optimus Prime, Lockdown prepares to leave in his ship. Marky Mark, Irish dude and the other Autobots sneak onto the ship to rescue Optimus and Tessa.

Tessa, meanwhile, gets chased by what look like evil Wall-Es with googly eyes. She finds out about the Seed and gets chased by robot dogs. Marky Mark finds a weapon room and gets a space gun. He gives Irish boy a space gun too, but Irish boy ends up being cowardly and useless so Marky Mark has to shoot their way out of there. They find and rescue Tessa and, with Bumblebee’s help, escape from the ship.

Meanwhile the other Autobots find Optimus in the prison section of the ship and find, too conveniently, that the prison section is a separate ship and can detach from the main ship, so they detach and escape. Lockdown, meanwhile, has not noticed any of this. He hasn’t noticed the gun battles and destruction within his ship, or that part of his ship has fallen off. He blasts off into space.

Optimus is concerned about the Seed and the whole ‘Galvatron is Megatron’ thing so they decide to take their newly acquired ship and get the seed. Marky Mark calls Tucci, who has relocated to China, and tells him not to use the seed. He tells him that Galvatron is obviously Megatron and that he needs to secure the seed otherwise it’ll blow up China and kill millions. Tucci, surprisingly, is totally swayed by Marky Mark. He tells Frasier that he’s not going to use the seed, which pisses off Frasier since he wanted money from the space metal. This scene is odd since it changes Frasier’s motivations for the third time, from ‘kill all the aliens so they don’t start trouble’, to ‘make a robot army so no more soldiers have to die’ to ‘I just want lots of money’.

Galvatron suddenly turns himself on, goes evil, takes control of the other fifty of Tucci’s manufactured robots and tries to get hold of the Seed. Tucci and his Asian advisor flee in a car. Frasier and his evil military sidekick both decide to hunt down and kill Tucci just because I guess, and they also want to kill Marky Mark as well, just because at this stage.  

Tucci makes it to the middle of a busy Chinese city and the Cemetery Wind troops show up to kill him, but his Asian advisor does karate and stops them. Marky Mark and the Autobots turn up to provide support, but then Galvatron and his evil robot army turn up and shoot down the prison ship Optimus is currently piloting. A big fight starts as the robots are killing each other and the humans run away. Marky Mark has a long fistfight against Cemetery Wind’s commander (don’t remember his name) and kills him by kicking him out of the window of a high apartment. Frasier sees this and, pissed off, calls Lockdown to tell him that Optimus is in China.

Meanwhile Optimus releases a bunch of giant freaky Transformers from the crashed prison ship and tells them to join him in his fight otherwise he’ll beat them up. Their leader refuses and Optimus beats him up, and it’s revealed that these guys are Dinobots – they transform into Dinosaurs. So Optimus jumps on the leader’s back (he’s a T Rex now), picks up a robot sword and they ride into battle.

In the city John Goodman robot is defending Marky Mark and the rest of the humans, including Tucci and the bomb, while Marky Mark shoots robots and his daughter cries and whines. It looks grim, but then the DInobots turn up and kill all the evil robots. Lockdown then turns up in his ship and starts lifting things into the air and dropping them. No idea why, he just starts doing it.

Lockdown then starts fighting Optimus, and Marky Mark goes to help with his space gun. Frasier turns up and is about to kill Marky Mark but Optimus shoots and kills him. This should be an important moment but it isn’t (I’ll talk about this later). Optimus and Marky Mark combine forces and kill Lockdown.

Also, in the background, Galvatron (who never took part in any of the fighting in the finale) runs off to build a robot army and get revenge. It’s odd that everybody seemed to forget about him entirely the second Lockdown showed up at the end, especially since they made a big deal about the whole ‘he’s actually Megatron’ thing. I’m sure if there’s a sequel he’ll be there.

With everything done, Optimus tells the remaining Autobots to protect Marky Mark and his family (presumably for whatever trouble they’ll get to in the inevitable sequel). Optimus takes the seed and then flies into space to hunt down the Creators (who, apart from a single minute of conversation, have never been mentioned in this three hour film).  

The end.

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This is an odd Transformer movie. It’s odd since it does so much differently from the other Transformer films, while also doing the exact same things the series is typically derided for. It’s more serious, has a slower pace, has fewer action scenes, has more human-based action, has the smallest scale – it does so much differently. But then, by that same token, it does so much the same – the robot designs are still really ugly, there’s out-of-place juvenile humour thrown in, overwhelming product placement (it’s ridiculous), the robot action scenes are absolutely impossible to comprehend and everything explodes all the time. They’ve done this weird thing where they’ve tried to fix what was wrong with the franchise, and have seemingly picked the oddest things to change.

Now can I call this an improvement over the other movies? Not really. Why? Well the main problem with this movie is simple – it’s three fucking hours long and it seriously drags. I know the others were a similar length, but the slower pace here means that it feels like an eternity is passing. It feels more like an odd sidestep for the series than a step forward or backwards.

The big issue here is the fucking stupid story. They’ve done too much nonsense here. Why complicate the Transformers mythos any more than it already is? Why add in this Creator nonsense only to never have them talk about it outside of a few throwaway lines? Why bring freaking Megatron back at all if you’re just going to have him be absent for the finale? It’s all baffling.

Considering the (attempt at a) change in tone, there is a massive missed opportunity here character-wise: the biggest thing about Optimus Prime’s character is that he never wanted to hurt any humans. The first three films he did everything he could to protect them, gave endless speeches in their defence and basically hung around Earth for films 2 and 3 to protect all humans. This film tried to flip that; here Optimus is betrayed by them and resents them – he just wants to go home. But even with his disappointment and anger at humans he doesn’t want to hurt any of them. So when he kills Frasier that’s a big deal. That’s a defining character moment – It’s the first time he’s killed human, let alone hurt one. It’s a really big deal, but instead of addressing it we get a few more minutes of robot fighting and then it’s never mentioned again. It’s an avenue they should have explored.

The Dinobots were very disappointing. While they featured heavily in the advertising they get maybe five minutes screen time in a 165+ minute movie. They also don’t talk, have no personalities and never get named. I wanted to hear Grimrock talk nonsense while he ate dudes, but alas.

The best things about this movie are actually two of the human characters (which is an absolute shock for a Transformer movie). Marky Mark is a lot of fun in the lead role, and actually gets to take charge and do stuff. In fact that’s one big change from the other Transformers – there are a lot more action beats centred on human characters – chase scenes, fist fights, gun fights – the humans are involved, not simply watching the robots. Marky Mark does well here, so good for him. The other ace in the hole that lifts things up every time he’s on screen is Stanley Tucci. He’s freaking awesome as the wimpy jackass science dude who has to lug a robot nuclear bomb through a battlefield. He’s funny and infinitely watchable.  

In the end Transformers 4 is really weird. Apparently it’s already making box office records so giving a recommendation is pointless; if people want their giant robot action movies then this is there for them. It’s just a weird, overlong, needlessly convoluted one, but if you want explosions, robot fights and Marky Mark with a space gun then Age of Extinction has you covered.

Last giant robot note: Guillermo del Toro is making a Pacific Rim 2! Hooray!